Guild Wars 2

So, ive been on these forums from when hot launched seeing post after post about how hot content is HARD. And how I wouldn’t be able to run full glass cannon, and wouldn’t be able to survive as a solo player in the new zones.

I got hot when the sale started. And I think I missed something? Cause this combat is just as easy as Orr or any other lvl 80 zone ive been to. The only difference seems to be that most of the bosses in the zones have so much hp that its a waste of time to try and solo them. Even the new zones, its not a case of the bosses being hard its a case of them having such a ridiculous amount of hp that its fruitless to solo or have any kind of ‘fight’. I mean i really liked the new white mantle npc. They actually mimick pvp players…and I enjoyed fighting them. It didn’t take more than a couple fights though to see that they don’t do enough damage or have enough sustain to present any kind of threat. The exception were the blue ascalonian like spirits guarding the colloseum, those guys did decent damage…but it was mainly cause they were stacked ontop of eachother is very weird fashion….like 7 or more of them just stacked ontop of eachother doing the same skills when i first played the new zone, it didn’t look intentional lol.

Anyways I really hope in the future that you make more npc like these white mantle guys, but instead of increasing difficulty by increasing their hp a ridiculous amount….consider upping their damage ALOT and sustain a fair bit more?

Just a thought, id enjoy the game much more if this was the case. I’m always torn with this game, cause you have an absolutely beautiful combat engine and yet the fights are stalled by bland design choices. In my case these are mainly the insane survivability of the downed state and for pve its the npc described.

I mean maybe the problem is that glass cannon builds have too much survivalist by default? And there isn’t enough of a difference between them and the damage of tank builds to warrant players to switch between the two types of build. Intuitively you should make the new hot tank stats for players having problems with the zones….that would free you up to increase the damage output of the enemies and overall difficulty rather than this ridiculous hp enlargement! Everyone can still play and enjoy the new zones that way. And you know….theres still ‘grouping’ that makes you insanely powerful given the downed state, its a great handicap for players to lean on in the face of content that is too difficult for them. Not trying to be mean but i thought the point of the xpansion was to create challenging content? You are destined to fail if you are too concerned bout keeping it inclusive to all players. WE all lean on handicaps for pve content..its not shameful or anything. I mean really, the best thing to do to keep and create a ‘living world’ is to drastically increase (double or triple or more) the mortality rate on the ‘supposedly’ hard maps. RNG should apply to mortality rate as well if ur trying to create challenging pve combat zones.

i haven’t done the raids yet…but honestly that doesn’t matter. Raids are just like dungeons…closed instances where the only advancement available is to kill the enemy rather than ‘fight it’. And none of you kittenpond are gonna understand the difference…

the average player skill level was a lot lower pre HoT which caused this kind of reaction within the forum playerbase

also anet have had to nerf mobs due to them absolutely shredding bads inexperienced players to bits.

It depends on your expectations. HoT is much harder than most of GW2. However, I don’t find it hard and I’m not particularly good at GW2 nowadays. Most of my builds are self-made, I haven’t theorycrafted at all, and most of my characters run around in exotics.

I do think HoT zones are harder than Orr. Not by much, but Risen are more predictable and less damaging than HoT’s monsters.

Yobculture.5786:

the average player skill level was a lot lower pre HoT which caused this kind of reaction within the forum playerbase

also anet have had to nerf mobs due to them absolutely shredding bads inexperienced players to bits.

I guess that’s what happens when you play Farmville with swords and magic for 3 years :P I have to say as someone who started a couple of months before HoT came out, I felt a shock to the system between Central Tyria and HoT, but adapted pretty quickly as I still had good PvE habits such as kiting and I like relatively steep learning curves. Prior to HoT, I felt the game was too easy and was feeling a bit ‘meh’ but different strokes for different folks I guess.

The difficulty is highly dependent on what you’re playing. A glass necromancer or ranger for example is trivial, whereas a glass elementalist is hard mode in comparison. When you only have ~11k health, there are many regular enemies that can easily take you down.

I don’t consider HOT to be hard, perhaps that it requires paying attention more than original content. I do consider it to be harder than areas such as Orr.

Hah, you’re lucky you weren’t here for the release of Orr. Literally everything in GW2 is cake nowadays compared to the difficulty of the early GW2.

It’s been made easier since release.

aint meant to be crippling hard but to be hard enough to force you to use other skills than your auto attack and in that way i think they achieved that

as for actual hard combat theres raids

pre HoT Heal skills and cleanses were basically a commodity players dint even need to use during actual combat asides from dungeon boss fights and champs

I don’t find HoT hard. I find it extremely annoying. Every single enemy non stop pulling and knocking down and launching you. I’ve had very few deaths but just found the entire expansion to be annoying. Just killed a bunch of annoying mobs, what’s around the corner??? More of them?

HoT has enemies that when they scale up during larger fights get ridiculous. Champion Snipers are a great example of this, as are Champ Itzel Shadowwalkers (w/e they’re called)

Also all the boss OHKO’s in VB can be frustrating when people aren’t doing good CC.

But yes, HoT fights are not 1337 skillz required, but they do require coherent builds and actual skill usage.

Cerby.1069:

i haven’t done the raids yet…but honestly that doesn’t matter. Raids are just like dungeons…closed instances where the only advancement available is to kill the enemy rather than ‘fight it’. And none of you kittenpond are gonna understand the difference…

Are you sure it doesn’t matter? Seems like it might be bothering you.

The only thing that makes HoT “hard” is that the mobs are mostly of the annoying kind. You can kill em but it always takes longer than it should and after killing x amount of them you just start learning how to avoid mobs. It kinda makes exploring a bit less fun for me. I could do with fewer annoying mobs and a smaller agro range. All in all I can manage but to be honest they’ve made a lot of cool looking places and you just don’t really get to stand around and enjoy the scenery much because of it. I am just getting better at avoiding and running away from fights as many do. And if that’s the case then why bother putting mobs around all over the place like they do now? People tend to gravitate towards events as it is so I’d say there’s no reason not to thin the normal mobs a bit out to make walking around the areas more enjoyable. Just my view.